The long term view here should not really be what the potential impacts are today, it's already too late, but what can we do for the future? Does it make sense to be burning our limited natural resources and causing unknown dangers to our planet that may one day impact us this severely? What if global warming does cause the average sea level to rise, could we be seeing this type of destruction in coastal cites all over the world? What if every coastal city had to deal with this level of destruction? That's the scary thing.